Fitzgerald: Quebec’s suicidal immigration policy

When the Parti Quebecois promoted passage of a law to favor the admission of francophone immigrants (or, as it turned out, immigrants from countries deemed partly francophone, for their command of French in many cases was shaky) it did the following:

1. Favored maghrebins — Muslims from North African countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) over, say, immigrants from Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, and Ecuador. This has led to Montreal’s large Muslim population, and to the security problems, and expense of monitoring that population, that no one anticipated.

2. Created an atmosphere alarming to non-Muslim immigrants who have the greatest familiarity with Islam, including a large Maronite community and other Christians from the Middle East.

3. Created for itself conditions which, by favoring this maghrebin migration, not only has led to greater expense and physical insecurity for Canadians, but that must constantly worry Canadian authorities for another reason. For should there be jihad attacks by Muslims who have been allowed into Canada under the Quebecois policy of favoring, without any further distinction, francophone immigrants, the reaction will be harsh. It is possible that security measures will be ever-tighter at the border, and that this will make trade more expensive and less efficient, and tourism will suffer as well. And just imagine what the reaction would be were there to be an attack on American tourists by one or more of those beneficiaries of this “francophone first” policy, in Montreal or elsewhere in the Province of Quebec.

The millennium bomber, caught with a car full of hidden explosives, came from Algeria. He had been living in Montreal and was stopped by an alert border guard in Washington State. But what if such an attack had gone off? What would have been the economic consequences to Canada?

4. The uncontrolled and possibly uncontrollable Muslim presence in France and Belgium has caused a number of those most immediately affected, or those who have been the keenest to see what is happening in France, to want to go to Quebec. They would be exactly the kind of new immigrants, not least for cultural reasons, that Quebec and Canada should wish to welcome. The writer Maurice Dantec, who has left France and is now living in Quebec, is one well-known example. French Jews who are reported to be more than uneasy might still move to Quebec, but the large-scale presence of Muslims might dissuade them. Is this something that the government of Quebec has thought about?

5. The policy of favoring immigrants from francophone countries fails to consider the nature of Islam. The abyss between Believer and Infidel is neither imaginary nor the product of any particular behavior on the part of those Infidels. It is mandated by Islam itself. To the extent that someone presently called a Muslim takes the tenets of Islam seriously, or by the very act of calling himself a Muslim leaves himself and his descendants open to that possibility, he could be a threat to Infidels. This should not surprise. What should surprise is the continued willingness of others not to take Islam’s teachings seriously, not to investigate them, not to study how non-Muslims have been treated over 1350 years of history, from Spain to East Asia. The record does more than disquiet.

When the government of Quebec instituted the policy of favoring francophone immigrants, it did not consider, and was not even thinking about, that larger gulf between Believer and Infidel that is permanent and is more than a matter of nouns and verbs. It was not thinking of the safety of its own citizens, much less of what might happen if through such a policy an environment unfriendly to American tourists and trade might be created. It was thinking only of anglophone Canada, and how to discourage immigrants from Italy or Greece or Portugal who might prefer to have their children learn, and use, English. They are in effect insisting by fiat that French can be protected, but their protection includes a policy that in far greater ways undoes the very thing it was expected to do. It threatens Quebec and its cultural and civilizational coherence far beyond whatever would-be speakers of English among its non-Muslim immigrants might have threatened them.

5. And there is one more thing. The Province of Quebec has its own immigration policy at present. That policy does not, however, threaten only Quebec. For those immigrants, once they have been admitted to Quebec, then become citizens not of the province, but of Canada itself. And they can move freely anywhere in Canada. Thus does an immigration policy fashioned for reasons of Quebec nationalism threaten the safety of Canadians in Alberta or British Columbia. Should this not be a matter for all Canadians to discuss? Surely anglophone Canada could exempt from general attack the favoring of francophone immigrants, while insisting that francophone immigrants form the Maghreb not be part of that program. But what would it take to even begin to discuss this kind of thing?

It would take a willingness, by some, to start discussing the tenets of Islam, the texts of Islam, the history of Islamic conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims. Can the Western world, can Canada, allow itself what is apparently the most unreasonable, and most unheard-of, thing conceivable — to examine and analyze Islam? And then to act based on that examination and analysis of Islam’s tenets, and of the observable behavior and attitudes of Muslims around the world — beginning with those now resident in France, in Italy, in England, in Belgium, in Holland, in Germany, in Denmark, in Sweden, in Norway? Or shall we keep pretending that everything we can see for ourselves does not mean what it must mean? Is this how governments in the Western world, with a duty to instruct and protect their citizens, should behave?

And does not the government of Quebec have a duty not only to its own citizens, but to those fellow Canadians outside of Quebec who had nothing to do with this policy of favoring francophone immigrants which so far has tended to favor the Maghrebins — a policy which, in its application, threatens their interests, and them?

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